Presidio

by Randy Kennedy

  *

  Above him, Aron heard the familiar metallic keening and he looked up to see the circle of grayish light, now unobstructed by the grate. As the ladder was lowered down he stood up against the side of the hole to keep from being struck. A voice told him to climb out and to carry the Bible up with him this time.

  “Why?”

  “Because I said so. What other reason is there?”

  He put his feet on the rungs but he felt this time, for the first time, that he was not going to make it all the way to the top. He put the Bible under his arm and began to climb but managed only four rungs before he had to rest. The light in the hole went away—the guard’s head was blotting it out as he stared down inside to see what the problem was. “Ándale!” he said and shook the ladder and Aron fell off, landing painfully on the heels of his bare feet. He picked up the Bible and made it high enough the second time that the guard was able to reach down and latch on to his collar and haul him up the rest of the way.

  “Please don’t take it,” he said, remaining on his knees clutching the Bible, squinting painfully into the morning light, speaking Spanish for the first time in months.

  “I’m not going to take it, cabrón,” he said, laughing. “You’re going to take it. As a souvenir of your stay here at our tropical resort.” The guard picked up the black faux-leather-bound Bible, which was bursting at the seams, its browned pages bulging out like dead leaves.

  The guard turned his head away. “It stinks like shit. It stinks even worse than you do, alemán.”

  He took Aron to a regular, empty cell and told him to remove the decaying clothes he had arrived in. Two other guards hosed him down with cold water and gave him a towel. They handed him a pair of white cotton pants and a shirt of the same material, thin like children’s pajamas, and a pair of stiff huaraches that were too small, fitting only the front part of his feet. He knew that by law he was supposed to be given back the bills and coins he had had in his pocket when he was arrested, but they gave him only a release paper and escorted him through a series of offices he had never seen before and out a garage door into an empty parking lot. He covered his eyes with one hand and stood for several minutes outside the closed door, stooping as if the sunlight and wide-open space were pushing him to the ground. Finally, he bent and put the Bible on the asphalt next to the jail wall and sat on it to wait until someone came to tell him what to do next.

  *

  Troy stayed on the farm and ranch roads but not the dirt roads, heading southwest at right angles toward Kermit, near the western elbow of the Panhandle. He chanced going that far in the station wagon only because every mile they put between themselves and Tahoka, keeping away from the larger towns and moving into the truly unpopulated stretches of the state, the better the chances of getting another car unnoticed. They couldn’t make a switch in a town now, even at the edge of one. This left primarily farmhouses, which presented no small risks of their own, risks that belied their isolation: dogs—vicious, scabby, near-feral ones, sometimes in number, unfenced and unpredictably located; entry by dirt road, which meant the impossibility of approach without raising a cloud of dust, signaling anybody a mile out; houses loaded with guns, more at the ready than they would be in town; available cars sitting outside with no cover, in the sun, like bait in a trap.

  On a one-lane ranch road between Kermit and Monahans they passed a house unusually hard against the pavement, a tiny place. Someone had begun to stucco it but had run out of money or will, leaving only black tar paper halfway up to the eaves. Chickens, a few of which could be seen crowding into the small shadows, had rendered the yard grassless. There was no good way to tell if anyone was home. The door was closed behind the screen door and the two front windows, facing south, were covered with foil to keep out the sun.

  Troy passed, slowing slightly, but once they had gone several hundred yards beyond the house he yanked the car off the narrow road, bounced it into the bar ditch, back up onto the road and down into the opposite ditch before pulling onto the pavement again, headed the way they had come. He went by the house at full speed and traveled a hundred yards more before he took the car gently into the ditch and onto a harvested milo field alongside a windbreak ridge thick with tumbleweeds snagged in mesquite and shinnery oak.

  He cut the motor. After being in the car so long with the roar of the engine and the road, the silence was stupefying. Being in a car on the run made it seem even more so. To Troy it sounded like death. He looked back and saw no evidence of the girl. Harlan might as well not have been in the car, either—he had said nothing for more than an hour, staring ahead with his right elbow hanging out the open passenger window; he looked as if he no longer cared what happened to him or where he was being taken.

  “I’m leaving the keys in the ignition,” Troy said. “If you see anybody coming around this windbreak except me, scoot like hell behind the wheel and take off and lay on the horn. Roll up your window and lock the doors as soon as I get out.”

  Troy left with no hope that Harlan would do any of these things but it turned out not to matter. He was back in less than five minutes, moving at a trot. He knocked on the station wagon’s rear window and motioned to Harlan and the girl, who rose tentatively into sight. Harlan looked in the side-view mirror and caught sight of the rounded nose of some highly burnished black thing parked on the road behind them, most of it obscured by the brush. It looked like the front end of a hearse.

  Troy reached in to unlock the back door and grabbed the bags and told the girl to climb over and get out in a hurry. Harlan walked around a stand of mesquite and saw the entirety of what Troy had found, a black 1950 Ford Business Coupe so pristine it could have just come off the factory floor. The whitewalls were as bright as new-fallen snow and the grille, decorated with a finned chromium bullet between the headlights, reflected the sun so that you could not look at it directly. Harlan laid his hand on the curve of the rear fender.

  “Well, I guess as long as we’re all being thieves here, I’d say this is something else.”

  Troy opened the driver’s-side door and threw in the bags and held it open.

  “It’s a shame, is what it is,” he said. “This isn’t just a car. It’s like stealing somebody’s child. On top of which, it’s going to be like driving a bullhorn down the road blaring out to everybody we pass: ‘Take a real good look at the people in the old antique! What a car! Tell your friends and neighbors!’ We’re going to get rid of it as soon as we have the chance and we’re going to make sure it gets left in the condition we found it.”

  Troy looked at the girl, who had followed them to the paved road trailing the immense beige hunting jacket that seemed to be her only possession in the world. She stared blankly at the side of the coupe, seeming to make an effort to strike a pose of tractability, of waiting for instructions. Troy pushed the seat up and she got into the back of the car, which seemed somehow far larger than it did from the outside; it looked as if she was sitting on a sofa in a tea parlor. She put her arms into the hunting coat and situated herself in the middle of the wide leather bench and withdrew her head into the corduroy collar and her hands up the sleeves, turtlelike, disappearing except for her legs and the opalescent top of her head.

  The interior of the coupe smelled of Pine-Sol and lanolin. It was plain no one had ever been allowed to smoke inside it and the odometer showed just under three thousand miles. It was only a two-door, but it felt much roomier than the station wagon—as if its contours possessed the ability to contract and expand at will. Troy forbade the touching of anything, even the window handles, though the car remained cool inside with the windows up; it had been sitting in a darkened garage probably for years, dusted weekly. Polished walnut grain covered the dash and door panels and the seats were brown leather, pleated every three inches for air flow, firm and high to provide the best view out the windows, tinted faintly green like the glass of a Coca-Cola bottle.

  For the first few minutes after they started down the road again Tr
oy felt exhilarated to be in such a vehicle, atop such splendid shock absorbers; it was more like being inside a car museum than a car. But after a few miles the immaculateness began to feel strange, as if the owner perversely wanted the car to seem to have no owner at all, never to have been driven. It reminded him of a Chevy 210 he was once supposed to deposit in Fort Worth. The interior had smelled powerfully of some orange-scented disinfectant, pleasant in itself, but it made Troy begin to wonder if the odor was intended to cover up another. Had there been an accident? Had someone died in the car? The smell worked on his imagination until it gave him the willies, and he ditched the car before he got to Abilene.

  As they moved south on roads around the town of Monahans, the prairie became paler and sandier, no longer covered by emptied furrows but by shinnery oak, the only thing that kept the dry soil, formed by millions of years of erosion and wind, from eroding entirely and blowing away. Viewed toward the horizon the whole prairie still appeared to be tableland but low dunes swelled up now, obscured by their uniformity, an optical illusion broken only when the black rocker of a pumpjack appeared and disappeared among them, tugging rhythmically at its rod. Fifteen minutes outside town they crossed the Pecos River, whose historical importance to the Old West was marked at that point by nothing but a short stretch of raised road bracketed by a pair of rusted guardrails. In the distance to the southwest the Davis Mountains spread a bar between land and sky, marking the end of the flatland until it picked up again in the desert on the Mexican side.

  They took the farm roads south of Pecos toward the small town of Balmorhea, passing only a few people, mostly farm pickups. The men behind the windshields waved reflexively, raising two fingers from the tops of their steering wheels before registering the sight approaching them and turning their heads to watch the coupe shoot past.

  Harlan had stopped thinking about how many people must be trying to find them by now—they had blurred into an abstraction too big to encompass. The girl was not visible in the mirror from his vantage point on the passenger side so he pushed himself sideways on the seat, turning his head slowly to see that she had fallen asleep. She was slumped over on the seat as if she had suddenly lost consciousness, her head pushed awkwardly against Troy’s bag and her thin body crooked across the seat. Harlan could see that she had bad teeth, too small and too widely spaced against her pink gums, like pickets in a fence. The hunting jacket had come off her shoulders and lay bunched around her legs. The bare tops of her arms, below the short sleeves of her blouse, were smooth and unmarked, without the moonlike smallpox scar that the arm of an American child her age would have had. But she didn’t look so different from an American child, not as different close up as he had expected, except for the paleness of her complexion and her hair. She wore faded blue jeans cut for a boy and a rose-print button-up shirt that looked handed down but not homemade. Harlan wondered if Germans in Germany, or wherever Mennonites came from originally, were this pale or whether living in Mexico had somehow had the effect of bleaching their skin and hair even lighter, marking them even more deeply as the outsiders they were. A Mennonite farmhand once told him they called themselves “the quiet in the land” and he had remembered this because it had such a nice ring but also because it seemed to describe them perfectly, or his experience of the ones he knew, a people who were always around but never fully present.

  After half an hour of silence, Harlan turned on the radio, which was tuned to a Spanish station and filled the car with jaunty music played with tubas and trumpets, clean and clear, as if the radio station was somewhere just outside the car.

  Troy reached down and turned it off. He had put his sunglasses on and sat up close to the wheel, holding it anxiously at ten and two like a young driving student, eyeing the speedometer to see how far he could push the engine.

  “What’re we going to do with her?” Harlan said. “She can’t be more than ten years old.”

  Troy tensed his thighs to raise himself and look at the girl in the rearview mirror.

  “We just keep driving for now. Maybe we figure out a way to drop her in Fort Davis if we make it that far—wait until the sun goes down. They’ll pick her up trying to take a bus and have her back in Tahoka by tomorrow. She’ll be fine.”

  “Where do we go then?”

  “Presidio’s the straight shot, straight south. Once we get below the highway there’s nothing between here and Mexico but empty road. I might know somebody there who can help us get across.”

  “You always seem to know somebody but I haven’t seen a soul yet with my own eyes. I bet you know as many people in Presidio as I do. How much Spanish have you got?”

  “Enough to get along. You must know some yourself by now.”

  “A few words, from Inés, that I remember. She liked to teach me. Bettie never would. She told me she wanted to leave her old language behind for good. She picked up English real fast.”

  The girl began to stir behind them, making a muffled sound like crying, but then she seemed to wake and catch herself and fell silent again. She sat up and pulled the coat around her, leaving her long hair straggled across her face like a threadbare curtain, a defective sight barrier between her and the two men in front of her.

  Troy and Harlan left off speaking, staring through the windshield at the approaching mountains. After ten minutes the girl’s voice broke the silence:

  “I’m very hungry, Troy, can we please pull over somewhere to eat? I need to go to the bathroom, too.”

  No one besides Harlan had called Troy by his real name for more than two years. Martha used it only because she had been brought up to address adults properly and she didn’t know his family name.

  “Don’t call me that—that’s not my real name,” Troy said. “If you want something just ask for it.”

  Martha looked at the back of Troy’s neck, which was pale, not reddish brown from the sun like those of all the grown men she had known in her life.

  “That’s what your brother calls you.”

  “What makes you think he’s my brother?”

  Martha stopped to think about how she should answer.

  “I have ears,” she said.

  “You don’t know a true thing about either one of us, even if you think you do. None of us is going to get to know each other long enough for names. As soon as nightfall comes we’re going to get you to a bus depot and you’re on your own.”

  “I heard what you said before, that they’ll take me back to Tahoka if I try to get on a bus.”

  Troy looked into the mirror at her again and she met his eyes. “You’re a hell of a listener, aren’t you? You’re a little young to be on a Greyhound by yourself. But who knows? You might get lucky.”

  “Maybe I’ll tell them things about you,” she said.

  Troy put his eyes back on the road.

  “You knock yourself out, little lady. As deep as we are in this, nothing you say is going to make it any worse.”

  She waited before she said what occurred to her to say next. “It’s not that I don’t want to go back to Tahoka,” she said. “It’s just . . . I can’t go back there.”

  Troy looked at her.

  “Why is that?”

  She didn’t say anything and Troy had to ask her again what she meant.

  “Because they hurt me,” she said.

  Harlan turned his head toward Troy, who was holding Martha’s eyes in the mirror.

  “Who hurts you?”

  She waited.

  “Your uncle? Your aunt? What do you mean they hurt you?”

  She decided to leave it there, to fall silent now, to see what effect her words would have. She had never told a lie so outrageously wicked before and she was frightened at how convincingly she had been able to do it, with so few words, looking directly into a man’s eyes.

  Neither Troy nor Harlan spoke again and they drove in silence for a long time afterward.

  She watched the one called Harlan, who had turned slightly in her direction, as if he wanted
to talk. If she hadn’t already listened to his voice and gained a sense of what he was like, she would have been more afraid of him than the other one because he had a harder face, the look of someone she probably wouldn’t talk to if she had a choice. His cheeks bristled with gray-brown whiskers that looked as stiff as wire, and he wore a sweat-stained cowboy hat inside the car, set back so that all of his high forehead showed—tanned, leathery, laced across with hundreds of threadlike wrinkles.

  He faced her fully now.

  “My name is Harlan,” he said. “What is your name, girl?”

  She could tell by the way he looked at her that he really wanted to know.

  “Martha.”

  “What’s your family name?”

  “My full name is Martha Mary Zacharias.”

  As soon as she said it she wondered whether she should have let it be known, fearing that it might give them back some of the power her knowledge of their names had given her. The larger brother made no response but looked at her with his big face, as if trying to reconcile her name to her appearance or some experience he had had with a name like it before. She didn’t meet his eyes, but feeling them on her she became self-conscious and turned to stare out at the passing land, which was beginning to look wilder, less like Texas, more like Chihuahua. She knew enough of the Texas map—especially the parts in the Southwest with so few towns—to have a sense of where they were now.

  “I need to eat,” she repeated. “I haven’t had any food in a whole day.”

  Troy wished desperately that he still had a watch. He looked out the peak of the windshield to find the sun, which appeared well past the meridian, though it was hard to tell. Even this far into fall the Texas sun was still as powerful as it was in summer, but it was coming from the wrong angle, the angle of descent, straight into your eyes. On the left side of the car hard shadows angled off the telephone poles, though the wires connecting the poles cast no visible shadows, as if the sun obliterated them.